An essay I wrote for a composition theory class concerning my personal methods of how the fuck to write an essay. It got an A.
Step one: ensure you have a hard copy of the assignment in a condition that can be easily read. This is also step two and step three, and is of critical importance – it doesn't matter if there's a copy of it available online, or if you know for a fact that you've got a copy of it sitting in your email. Ensuring that, at the very least, you're capable of beginning work on the assignment is one of the few aspects of writing that shouldn't be procrastinated upon – in my experience, there are few things nearly so terrible as sitting down the night before an eight-page paper is due to write it and realizing that you don't have and cannot access a copy of the actual assignment. During the week leading up to a written assignment of any length, I'm likely to check and make sure I've got the document in my bag at least once each day. This has the added benefit of planting and replanting the raw concept of a due paper into my mind each day, as it's difficult to resist the compulsion to quickly read over the assignment sheet each time it's pulled out. The over-awareness of the looming due date combined with the constant reminder of topic creates an urgency and thought process that I find to be nearly essential in composition.
The second component in my process is the collation of data, whether it be in the form of hard research, stupid anecdotes or critical segments of fiction. This is the first phase where a steno pad becomes critical, both for the recording of relevant quotes and pages numbers, but also as a method of forcefully extracting from my brain ideas and the phrases that they could be used in. I find that hand-writing at least this segment makes for a more natural flow to the prose, and I find it easier to connect and introduce quotations when I can hurriedly sketch out two or three or fifteen versions and see each of them before me. Although this can be done on a computer, automatic formatting and space restrictions limit the amount of digital real estate that you can dedicate to it.
This second area of pre-writing focus is also important as it allows for time specifically devoted to gaining a thorough understanding not only of the various works that will be included in the paper, but how to structure my interpretation of those works in the context of the assignment. Although my interpretations of works, particularly those that fall under the category of fiction, tend to be wild stabs in the dark that occasionally find their mark, I find that it elevates my level of confidence sufficiently so that I can complete the assignment. We'll return to this concept later, but for now self-assuredness is assured.
Thus we, or I, move into the structuralization/development phase of the essay. This is where a series of physical items non-related to the subject matter become critical; cigarettes, an ample supply of coffee, a steno pad, and a Pilot Precise v5 RT (black) ensure comfort and the immediate satisfaction of physical urges that would otherwise drive me away from the craft. The creation of a thesis and major talking points is also established during this period. Although not always succesful, I've found that if I can establish even two or three major ideas to work into the paper then I've already completed half of the work. Generally, the remainder of ideas will be generated during the actual writing process and done electronically.
Sometimes, after the first, black-ink-written draft of the thesis statement is complete, I will immediately jump into typing what will become the sword of the first draft. I'm also prone to, on occasion, write ten to fifteen pages of prose on the steno pad before proceeding to this. I've found that this isn't really something that I can plan and is directly related to my level of confidence with the material at hand – if I know my game well enough, then I can burn through the grunt work of writing the essay quickly, whereas if I am unsure then I can and have spent hours slaving over individual sentences. This phase is also where cheap beer can become hugely beneficial, provided I take care to clean up the style when sobriety returns.
Writing free from a planned structure is a double-edged sword. When I'm sure of what my major ideas are going to be and have them planned out, it becomes a mere matter of filling in the colored lines with the right color of crayon until completion. The unfortunate aspect of the pre-structured essay, for me, is that I have a more difficult time connecting the points together, and I often myself writing three to four sentence paragraphs just to connect the two ideas when a closing sentence should have been sufficient. This issue is entirely sidestepped when the majority of the prose is undecided and is written as the paper develops; the flexibility of being able to place major ideas where I find they integrate the best allows me to write a far more fluid essay than the former method.
I've found that the freehand, write-it-as-you-think-it sort of crafting is more suitable towards essays of this nature which require personal reflection and independent analysis of fiction or poetry. I've also found that the structured approach tends to work more in favor of rigid, data-interpretation-style essays, and those works where the presentation of the right information was more important than the presentation of the right prose.
Throughout the actual hammering process, I will pause after every couple of sentences and after every paragraph and read the previous few lines aloud; I find this to help immensely when determining not only whether or not the sentence works, but also for the tone that it conveys. Too snarky, too ambiguous, too elitist? I have a tendency to glaze entirely over accidental tone shifts when merely reading, and speaking the words aloud helps me to identify problem areas and correct them.
After the bulk of the essay is completed (which may or may not include the introductory paragraph – it can be a personal wild card for me when I find that I'm prepared to write this), I read over it twice in it's entirely, correcting grammatical and structural errors while attempting to clean up the prose. After this, I find something else to occupy my mind for a short while. This is inevitably one violent video game or another, and the pulverization of digital people into digital bloody pulp provides exactly the sort of release that I need to focus on the final, and arguably most challenging, part of the essay: reading through the damn thing again and again until enough errors are repaired to convince myself that there is little more than can be done with it.
Which is exactly when it gets printed, another cigarette lit, and read again. After I've decided that I'm content with essay, I complete my final adjustments and begin formatting. Since high school, I've preferred to save this part of the craft for last. I despise the way that double-spaced typing appears and find that formatting as I write distracts me, and I've come to enjoy the final formatting process – it feels like finally striking the death blow on an internet dragon, and it's almost as rewarding.
At a certain point during this process, music becomes integral, and must come in the form of enclosed-style studio headphones. Typically, the draft stages tend to have music focused around a beat and certain varieties of hip hop work excellently for this; for example, the initial writing process of this essay was done to Viktor Vaughn's Vaudeville Villain. As the essay developed and my typing grew quicker and more confident, the music changed into the substantially more aggressive and suitable death-metal stylings of Wolfchant. This path is rarely deviated from; although the bands change, the tempo and type of music rarely does. Slow, steady music is excellent for laying down foundations and creating bricks, whereas purposefully angry and fast music is great for essentially filling up space. The other wonderful function that it serves is a bolster of confidence; it's quite easy for me to lose steam midway if I've got nothing to listen to, but by allowing myself to get heavily into the music keeps my spirits quite high. This is high point is, of course, completely destroyed when I decide that the paper is complete and submit it for grading, but I've yet to find anything that can allay that trauma.
Friday, January 30, 2009
Drug Addicts, Con-Artists, Thieves and Liars: The Modern Writer
Essay I wrote for a composition class concerning the mass-media representations of writers-at-large. It got an A.
Drug Addicts, Con-Artists, Thieves and Liars: The Modern Writer
Every word an implement in a vicious, pitched battle, chosen carefully and placed optimally to ensure optimal effectiveness, I write not to establish concept but rather defend idea and notion. The front is ever-present and watchful – the mind and mentality of the audience, accepting for nothing as given, is a force that must be compelled in one direction over another. I find few things so engrossing and entertaining as the persuasion of other people through the written word, and it is by the road of the written word that I intend to make my career. There are multiple paths to achieve this end, and, with that in mind, I chose five films that I felt effectively demonstrated five separate branches of my chosen road.
Although Nick Naylor, the central character of Thank You for Smoking, spends little time either composing or delivering pre-written speeches, his career is entirely focused on the persuasion of targeted groups of people. As the Vice President and chief spokesperson of the Academy of Tobacco Studies, a special interest group whose mission it is to determine whether or not a link exists between cigarette smoke and lung cancer and funded by large tobacco businesses, it is his job to ensure that the public gets the “correct” information that cigarettes are perfectly safe. Regardless of the quality of the information or the methods by which it's presented against him, Naylor is able to effectively spin the story so that it directly benefits the cause of his company instead of damaging it. Slick, crafty and clever, Naylor – and his job function – appear to be nearly as beloved as they are despised. That what appear to be one of the most gifted rhetoricians of the world in which Thank You for Smoking takes place works for a blatantly evil corporation speaks to common misconceptions that the real world has about those that can cleverly tell lies and twist words into distorted half-truths; slippery at best and morally bankrupt at worse, lawyers, politicians and charismatic businessmen are viewed with a healthy skepticism.
Thank You also tends to emphasize the masculinity of the position. Naylor's closest friends, both male and in the employment of equally evil companies, are chauvinistic. The female counterpart to the fast-talking Naylor is Heather Holloway, who plays a reporter that's actively working to achieve a fair story of the chief spokesperson. In order to manipulate her way into as much information as possible from Naylor, she begins to sleep with him, suggesting that she couldn't intellectually compel him to provide it – suggesting, even, that her most effective weapon, perhaps as a woman, was not how bloody clever she could be but rather that she had no issue with objectifying her body. Although the film doesn't otherwise actively suggest that women are inferior to men in this capacity, it's important to note that charismatic business people, politicians and lawyers are predominantly male.
While exhibiting his characteristic crazed and somehow ultra-lucid charisma, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson was credited with the invention of gonzo journalism, which can best be described as entirely subjective, ground-level journalism. The biopic Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson tells the story of the development of his craft, and follows him through encounters with Hell's Angels, the infamous California-based biker gang, the lead up to the 1972 election, and a series of sports reporting for Rolling Stone. Abandoning objectivity long before he began being published, Thompson wrote with clear intention in mind, tailoring his word choices and structure to convey specific ideas and influence his audience. Although his credibility as a reporter was questionable at best, his ability to persuade, argue and write his way into the minds of his readers was and is striking. Thompson, however, did little to allay a common conception of the writer; drug-addled, anti-authoritative, and only occasionally coherent, he displayed to the world the raving voice of a lunatic. This, coupled with other Beatnik-era writers from the previous decades like William S. Burroughs, created the popular image of the ink-stained and half-crazed author.
Jack Torrance of The Shining amplified the level of madness portrayed by Thompson tenfold; not content to merely be eclectic and outspoken, Jack Nicholson's character instead becomes completely delusional and, by film's end, filled with an incredible and murderous rage. Trapped inside of what seems to be a haunted luxury hotel for an extended winter with no company aside from his (boring and whiny) family and nothing to do but work on his novel, Jack Torrance goes completely batshit insane. His madness culminates in the last segment of the film, as his wife, Wendy, finds the manuscript that he's been slaving over for months. Instead of words, she finds a mantra, repeated in various formats throughout the manuscript, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” Following this is the infamous scene in which Nicholson hacks down the bedroom door with his axe and growls, “Heeeeere's Johnny!”
For better or worse, the vast majority of writers don't go insane. At least, not homicidally insane – some, like Steven King, might write about killing people a great deal, but it's rare that they actually start doing so. Just the same, the notion of a writer dealing with cabin fever and severe writer's block tends to be slightly creepy and being around a writer in this state is understandably off-putting to just about anybody. Writer's block has become nearly synonymous with the creative writer, especially in film and television. It's a bizarre occurrence when an author found in the media is actually producing something, and this tends to be flatly contradictory to people in that field in real life. Writer's block can be a terrible thing, but the majority of novelists and poets have long-since established methods of breaking blocks and even avoiding them entirely.
A young Will Shakespeare, working on the comedy-turned-tragedy that will soon by Romeo and Juliet, begins Shakespeare in Love in a similar situation to Jack Torrance. It is not so much the crazy-murdering-psychopath aspect, but very much the writer's-block – at least, until he meets the cleverly named Viola de Lesseps, whom he quickly falls in love with. As a result of this love, the young Shakespeare is overcome with inspiration and begins to work feverishly on what will become one of his most widely-known works. The young Shakespeare, characterized by idle daydreaming and easily overcome by idealism, represents another key aspect of the craft - the poet - the writer dedicated to ensuring that not only should language convey ideas and sway minds, but also that it should be beautiful.
Although Will fits the mold of the archetypal poet, actual generalizations of poets tend to be somewhat inaccurate due to their wildly varying nature in real life. From personal experience alone, I've encountered the typical melancholy, somber-always-serious sorts, the happy-go-lucky and painfully chipper ones, and the professional, pretentious and ever-sort-of-smiling folks. The universal truth to media representations of writers, particularly creative ones, is the universal fun made of them; irrelevant and antiquated relics of a dead age, they often bear the brunt of jokes directed at English majors. Except for the now-clichéd question asked of all English majors: “What in the world are you going to do with an English degree, lol?” The greatest inaccuracy of Shakespeare in Love's presentation of this archetype is that it actually gets an audience.
While poets in popular culture have the tendency to be seen as pointless, another field of writing receives nearly as much mocking; that of the critic. The possibly-unfortunate truth of the role of the critic, however, is that of audience; typically reaching, in a modern setting, far more people than the poets, critics often end up being outright despised by far greater numbers than creative types. As it turns out, people generally don't like being told that their work, whether it be in film, music, theater or gaming, sucks, and fans of those works don't particularly enjoy being told that their beloved Twilight sucks. In the animated television show The Critic, Jon Lovitz provides the voice – and more than a little personality – for Jay Sherman, “New York's third most popular early-morning cable-TV film critic." 1 Jay represents the film/art-elitist critic that people read even though they despise; even his physical bearing, diminutive and unattractive, is unpleasant. Unfortunately, Jay also demonstrates that terrible aspect of criticism in which nothing is analyzed and gut reaction is his only guide; “It stinks!” is not a criticism of the movie, it's a bland statement of opinion with no support structure behind it – it's worthless. Although there are certainly critics that fall into the oversimplification camp, there are yet still many that will spend five hundred words examining the peculiarities of the cinematography of the film. While some people enjoy archaic and off-kilter references, ivory-tower elitism, and the evisceration of works of poor quality, others tend to absolutely despise these.
Jay Sherman, as is typical with media representations of critics, is a male – so too are the journalist, novelist, playwriter, and PR-thug - and it's little wonder; in a world that is dominated by male figures, it comes as little surprise that the general idea of a writer in American culture is almost ever-masculine, particularly when that writing is conducted on the public and/or professional level. Films like Thank You for Smoking do little to alter this stereotype, placing women almost entirely in either subordinate or sexually subversive positions, reinforcing the illusion that men are best suited towards that line of work, and even suggesting that in order for women to attain positions of power and prestige as writers of any kind they must sacrifice their dignity. Although Viola de Lesseps from Shakespeare in Love was absolutely integral to the formation of Will's masterwork, she finds herself in a position approximating that of Heather Halloway in Thank You for Smoking – inspirational and critical to the creation of the work, but never directly involved in the final project and entirely subordinate to Will and his whims. Wendy Torrance plays essentially the same part in The Shining – although her subordinate/inspirational position is labeled as mother/caretaker/loving wife, it serves the same purpose as that of the other leading females mentioned.
Unfortunately, the trend in film to favor the creative prowess of men over women seems to be at least partially reflected in aspects of real-life writing and rhetoric. As mentioned earlier, the majority of publically seen politicians and lawyers are male. Certain genres of literature, particularly that of science fiction, tend to be the near-exclusive domain of men, and although there appear to be more male than female authors in general when perusing the shelves of a local bookstore, the disparity between the two is perhaps not as extreme as tends to be suggested in the media. According to the Borders website, of the 10 best books of 2008 according to “The New York Times Book Review,” three were published by women.2
Representations of writers and speakers in the media tend to be both damned and praised. Will in Shakespeare in Love is a heavily-romanticized image of a playwright/poet; dark, tall, and irresistibly attractive to the women present in the film, he approaches, appropriately, the archetypal bard, able to enchant and delight audiences with little more than the words of his mouth and a sly smile. The slick and clever character of Nick Naylor is impossibly quick on his mind, able to deflect the harshest and most damning criticism of his organization and cite obscure studies without breaking his roguish grin. The true-to-life picture of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson painted by Gonzo is often anything but glamorous, and often seems to be making a caricature of the writer and dissident – the heavy drug use and rampant alcoholism would suggest, to most people, an incapacity to function on any workable level, but Thompson manages with a gritty and half-delirious determination.
Writers tend to be a pretty varied group of people – and only seldomly do they meet the standards of the media. Many of them, particularly the creative types, tend to be tortured sorts, seeming to thrive on misery and trouble. Even on the campus of this school there are dramatically controversial and outspoken members of the press, exhibiting (if they weren't arguing in favor of the status quo) an anti-authoritarian and independent attitude in both writing and personality.
Due to what seems to be an inherent, random quirkiness of personality that comes from the capacity to write well, it’s fairly easy to satirize writers. Due to the broad spectrum, racially and economically, of poets, novelists, essayists and academics, they tend to be a fairly diverse crowd – it's a pretty safe bet that if you throw a knife into the crowd, you're fairly likely to hit somebody with a joke. NPR shows, particularly those on the weekends, seem to delight in poking fun at the field, presumably because a great many of the broadcasters and radio personalities went to school for English and inexplicably found themselves working in public radio. My personal favorite comes from Prairie Home Companion in a recurring skit called P.O.E.M. (Professional Organization of English Majors), where Garrison Kiellor pokes fun at various aspects of the field and all of the futility contained therein.
In personal experience, the writer/rhetorician position as portrayed in the media tends to be more romanticized than anything else. Due to a conflict of interest – that being that pretty much everything seen via the mass media was written by writers – it's difficult to determine if the field gets the same sort of treatment, whether positive or negative, as other fields. Over the next decade, we're likely to see a spat of films with villainous Wall Street executives cruelly gambling away pensions and football players running illegal dogfighting rings. But writing a series of controversial plays, pissing off the royalty, contracting syphilis and engaging in a spectacularly hedonistic lifestyle? Fairly likely, even if it was already done in Libertine. Are we likely to see a film that actively damns a writer, painting him in realistic and negative terms and not fetishizing his drug use and disregard for authority? Citing artificial sources in the New York Times? As unlikely as Hunter Thompson dying a natural death.
Drug Addicts, Con-Artists, Thieves and Liars: The Modern Writer
Every word an implement in a vicious, pitched battle, chosen carefully and placed optimally to ensure optimal effectiveness, I write not to establish concept but rather defend idea and notion. The front is ever-present and watchful – the mind and mentality of the audience, accepting for nothing as given, is a force that must be compelled in one direction over another. I find few things so engrossing and entertaining as the persuasion of other people through the written word, and it is by the road of the written word that I intend to make my career. There are multiple paths to achieve this end, and, with that in mind, I chose five films that I felt effectively demonstrated five separate branches of my chosen road.
Although Nick Naylor, the central character of Thank You for Smoking, spends little time either composing or delivering pre-written speeches, his career is entirely focused on the persuasion of targeted groups of people. As the Vice President and chief spokesperson of the Academy of Tobacco Studies, a special interest group whose mission it is to determine whether or not a link exists between cigarette smoke and lung cancer and funded by large tobacco businesses, it is his job to ensure that the public gets the “correct” information that cigarettes are perfectly safe. Regardless of the quality of the information or the methods by which it's presented against him, Naylor is able to effectively spin the story so that it directly benefits the cause of his company instead of damaging it. Slick, crafty and clever, Naylor – and his job function – appear to be nearly as beloved as they are despised. That what appear to be one of the most gifted rhetoricians of the world in which Thank You for Smoking takes place works for a blatantly evil corporation speaks to common misconceptions that the real world has about those that can cleverly tell lies and twist words into distorted half-truths; slippery at best and morally bankrupt at worse, lawyers, politicians and charismatic businessmen are viewed with a healthy skepticism.
Thank You also tends to emphasize the masculinity of the position. Naylor's closest friends, both male and in the employment of equally evil companies, are chauvinistic. The female counterpart to the fast-talking Naylor is Heather Holloway, who plays a reporter that's actively working to achieve a fair story of the chief spokesperson. In order to manipulate her way into as much information as possible from Naylor, she begins to sleep with him, suggesting that she couldn't intellectually compel him to provide it – suggesting, even, that her most effective weapon, perhaps as a woman, was not how bloody clever she could be but rather that she had no issue with objectifying her body. Although the film doesn't otherwise actively suggest that women are inferior to men in this capacity, it's important to note that charismatic business people, politicians and lawyers are predominantly male.
While exhibiting his characteristic crazed and somehow ultra-lucid charisma, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson was credited with the invention of gonzo journalism, which can best be described as entirely subjective, ground-level journalism. The biopic Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson tells the story of the development of his craft, and follows him through encounters with Hell's Angels, the infamous California-based biker gang, the lead up to the 1972 election, and a series of sports reporting for Rolling Stone. Abandoning objectivity long before he began being published, Thompson wrote with clear intention in mind, tailoring his word choices and structure to convey specific ideas and influence his audience. Although his credibility as a reporter was questionable at best, his ability to persuade, argue and write his way into the minds of his readers was and is striking. Thompson, however, did little to allay a common conception of the writer; drug-addled, anti-authoritative, and only occasionally coherent, he displayed to the world the raving voice of a lunatic. This, coupled with other Beatnik-era writers from the previous decades like William S. Burroughs, created the popular image of the ink-stained and half-crazed author.
Jack Torrance of The Shining amplified the level of madness portrayed by Thompson tenfold; not content to merely be eclectic and outspoken, Jack Nicholson's character instead becomes completely delusional and, by film's end, filled with an incredible and murderous rage. Trapped inside of what seems to be a haunted luxury hotel for an extended winter with no company aside from his (boring and whiny) family and nothing to do but work on his novel, Jack Torrance goes completely batshit insane. His madness culminates in the last segment of the film, as his wife, Wendy, finds the manuscript that he's been slaving over for months. Instead of words, she finds a mantra, repeated in various formats throughout the manuscript, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” Following this is the infamous scene in which Nicholson hacks down the bedroom door with his axe and growls, “Heeeeere's Johnny!”
For better or worse, the vast majority of writers don't go insane. At least, not homicidally insane – some, like Steven King, might write about killing people a great deal, but it's rare that they actually start doing so. Just the same, the notion of a writer dealing with cabin fever and severe writer's block tends to be slightly creepy and being around a writer in this state is understandably off-putting to just about anybody. Writer's block has become nearly synonymous with the creative writer, especially in film and television. It's a bizarre occurrence when an author found in the media is actually producing something, and this tends to be flatly contradictory to people in that field in real life. Writer's block can be a terrible thing, but the majority of novelists and poets have long-since established methods of breaking blocks and even avoiding them entirely.
A young Will Shakespeare, working on the comedy-turned-tragedy that will soon by Romeo and Juliet, begins Shakespeare in Love in a similar situation to Jack Torrance. It is not so much the crazy-murdering-psychopath aspect, but very much the writer's-block – at least, until he meets the cleverly named Viola de Lesseps, whom he quickly falls in love with. As a result of this love, the young Shakespeare is overcome with inspiration and begins to work feverishly on what will become one of his most widely-known works. The young Shakespeare, characterized by idle daydreaming and easily overcome by idealism, represents another key aspect of the craft - the poet - the writer dedicated to ensuring that not only should language convey ideas and sway minds, but also that it should be beautiful.
Although Will fits the mold of the archetypal poet, actual generalizations of poets tend to be somewhat inaccurate due to their wildly varying nature in real life. From personal experience alone, I've encountered the typical melancholy, somber-always-serious sorts, the happy-go-lucky and painfully chipper ones, and the professional, pretentious and ever-sort-of-smiling folks. The universal truth to media representations of writers, particularly creative ones, is the universal fun made of them; irrelevant and antiquated relics of a dead age, they often bear the brunt of jokes directed at English majors. Except for the now-clichéd question asked of all English majors: “What in the world are you going to do with an English degree, lol?” The greatest inaccuracy of Shakespeare in Love's presentation of this archetype is that it actually gets an audience.
While poets in popular culture have the tendency to be seen as pointless, another field of writing receives nearly as much mocking; that of the critic. The possibly-unfortunate truth of the role of the critic, however, is that of audience; typically reaching, in a modern setting, far more people than the poets, critics often end up being outright despised by far greater numbers than creative types. As it turns out, people generally don't like being told that their work, whether it be in film, music, theater or gaming, sucks, and fans of those works don't particularly enjoy being told that their beloved Twilight sucks. In the animated television show The Critic, Jon Lovitz provides the voice – and more than a little personality – for Jay Sherman, “New York's third most popular early-morning cable-TV film critic." 1 Jay represents the film/art-elitist critic that people read even though they despise; even his physical bearing, diminutive and unattractive, is unpleasant. Unfortunately, Jay also demonstrates that terrible aspect of criticism in which nothing is analyzed and gut reaction is his only guide; “It stinks!” is not a criticism of the movie, it's a bland statement of opinion with no support structure behind it – it's worthless. Although there are certainly critics that fall into the oversimplification camp, there are yet still many that will spend five hundred words examining the peculiarities of the cinematography of the film. While some people enjoy archaic and off-kilter references, ivory-tower elitism, and the evisceration of works of poor quality, others tend to absolutely despise these.
Jay Sherman, as is typical with media representations of critics, is a male – so too are the journalist, novelist, playwriter, and PR-thug - and it's little wonder; in a world that is dominated by male figures, it comes as little surprise that the general idea of a writer in American culture is almost ever-masculine, particularly when that writing is conducted on the public and/or professional level. Films like Thank You for Smoking do little to alter this stereotype, placing women almost entirely in either subordinate or sexually subversive positions, reinforcing the illusion that men are best suited towards that line of work, and even suggesting that in order for women to attain positions of power and prestige as writers of any kind they must sacrifice their dignity. Although Viola de Lesseps from Shakespeare in Love was absolutely integral to the formation of Will's masterwork, she finds herself in a position approximating that of Heather Halloway in Thank You for Smoking – inspirational and critical to the creation of the work, but never directly involved in the final project and entirely subordinate to Will and his whims. Wendy Torrance plays essentially the same part in The Shining – although her subordinate/inspirational position is labeled as mother/caretaker/loving wife, it serves the same purpose as that of the other leading females mentioned.
Unfortunately, the trend in film to favor the creative prowess of men over women seems to be at least partially reflected in aspects of real-life writing and rhetoric. As mentioned earlier, the majority of publically seen politicians and lawyers are male. Certain genres of literature, particularly that of science fiction, tend to be the near-exclusive domain of men, and although there appear to be more male than female authors in general when perusing the shelves of a local bookstore, the disparity between the two is perhaps not as extreme as tends to be suggested in the media. According to the Borders website, of the 10 best books of 2008 according to “The New York Times Book Review,” three were published by women.2
Representations of writers and speakers in the media tend to be both damned and praised. Will in Shakespeare in Love is a heavily-romanticized image of a playwright/poet; dark, tall, and irresistibly attractive to the women present in the film, he approaches, appropriately, the archetypal bard, able to enchant and delight audiences with little more than the words of his mouth and a sly smile. The slick and clever character of Nick Naylor is impossibly quick on his mind, able to deflect the harshest and most damning criticism of his organization and cite obscure studies without breaking his roguish grin. The true-to-life picture of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson painted by Gonzo is often anything but glamorous, and often seems to be making a caricature of the writer and dissident – the heavy drug use and rampant alcoholism would suggest, to most people, an incapacity to function on any workable level, but Thompson manages with a gritty and half-delirious determination.
Writers tend to be a pretty varied group of people – and only seldomly do they meet the standards of the media. Many of them, particularly the creative types, tend to be tortured sorts, seeming to thrive on misery and trouble. Even on the campus of this school there are dramatically controversial and outspoken members of the press, exhibiting (if they weren't arguing in favor of the status quo) an anti-authoritarian and independent attitude in both writing and personality.
Due to what seems to be an inherent, random quirkiness of personality that comes from the capacity to write well, it’s fairly easy to satirize writers. Due to the broad spectrum, racially and economically, of poets, novelists, essayists and academics, they tend to be a fairly diverse crowd – it's a pretty safe bet that if you throw a knife into the crowd, you're fairly likely to hit somebody with a joke. NPR shows, particularly those on the weekends, seem to delight in poking fun at the field, presumably because a great many of the broadcasters and radio personalities went to school for English and inexplicably found themselves working in public radio. My personal favorite comes from Prairie Home Companion in a recurring skit called P.O.E.M. (Professional Organization of English Majors), where Garrison Kiellor pokes fun at various aspects of the field and all of the futility contained therein.
In personal experience, the writer/rhetorician position as portrayed in the media tends to be more romanticized than anything else. Due to a conflict of interest – that being that pretty much everything seen via the mass media was written by writers – it's difficult to determine if the field gets the same sort of treatment, whether positive or negative, as other fields. Over the next decade, we're likely to see a spat of films with villainous Wall Street executives cruelly gambling away pensions and football players running illegal dogfighting rings. But writing a series of controversial plays, pissing off the royalty, contracting syphilis and engaging in a spectacularly hedonistic lifestyle? Fairly likely, even if it was already done in Libertine. Are we likely to see a film that actively damns a writer, painting him in realistic and negative terms and not fetishizing his drug use and disregard for authority? Citing artificial sources in the New York Times? As unlikely as Hunter Thompson dying a natural death.
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Solstice
It was foolish to think that
somehow today would be different
Foolish to think that though
the dreams came from a
golden, hopeful today,
they would influence,
of all days, today,
winter solstice
somehow today would be different
Foolish to think that though
the dreams came from a
golden, hopeful today,
they would influence,
of all days, today,
winter solstice
Friday, December 12, 2008
Blades of Grass
Today, I found this on refrigerator that I will never see again:
There are a great many thoughts I have concerning this, but they are both unwarranted and unwanted. Nonetheless, I feel the quotation expresses a certain sentimentality than I could otherwise.
Every blade of
grass has its
angel that bends
over it and whispers,
"Grow, grow."
-The Talmud
There are a great many thoughts I have concerning this, but they are both unwarranted and unwanted. Nonetheless, I feel the quotation expresses a certain sentimentality than I could otherwise.
Thursday, December 11, 2008
Snowmen for a Nuclear Winter
_____________________________________
Snowmen for a Nuclear Winter!
I made these with an old girlfriend, and were originally going to be Christmas gifts for my family. However, I tried to make them, oh, the day before, and thus sat unpainted or completed in my parent's basement for a year. I decided that, since my dear friend Susan had a birthday coming up, I'd not merely complete them, but completely change the dynamic - what were once sick and dying snowmen .. are now irradiated and damned snowmen! Although I didn't get the best quality of pictures (parents basement does not an ideal studio make), rest assured they are all capable of freely standing. Except for the poor one that got speared. More pictures beneath the cut.
annnnnd .. these are the rest of them:
Snowmen for a Nuclear Winter!
I made these with an old girlfriend, and were originally going to be Christmas gifts for my family. However, I tried to make them, oh, the day before, and thus sat unpainted or completed in my parent's basement for a year. I decided that, since my dear friend Susan had a birthday coming up, I'd not merely complete them, but completely change the dynamic - what were once sick and dying snowmen .. are now irradiated and damned snowmen! Although I didn't get the best quality of pictures (parents basement does not an ideal studio make), rest assured they are all capable of freely standing. Except for the poor one that got speared. More pictures beneath the cut.
annnnnd .. these are the rest of them:
Thursday, December 4, 2008
The Debate: Part 1 - Affirmative Opening
This is the debate thread I had to respond to for my final in a class this semester. My response is in the next post, the Negation Opening.
From Alex Gromak
The issue of online piracy, specifically illegally downloading music, is a topic that has been given a lot of attention in the past decade (Note, I will be focusing on the issue of downloading music, although this can be extended to all forms of digital media). Most of this discussion has been one side arguing that downloading music is not illegal, while the opposing side argues that it is. In actuality, downloading music online, commonly through p2p clients, is illegal. The question is: should it be? In this essay, I will show why the current laws that make downloading music illegal are flawed, and how the efforts to eliminate this issue are not effective. In doing so I will argue that we need a new, more accurate definition of Internet piracy and that the laws must be changed to better suit the issue at hand. Finally, I will demonstrate why organizations like the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), who hunt down and prosecute illegal music downloaders, are not working, in any sense, to solve this problem; not to mention the possibility that their own efforts to find illegal downloaders may be illegal, and their results unethical.
To begin, let’s look at some ways in which the current laws that deem music downloading to be illegal are flawed. Roy Furchgott, in The International Herald Tribune, on September 4th of 2008 explains that in the United States, a case pitting Sony Corporation of America against Universal City Studios, known as “The Betamax case” allows people to record CDs to their iPods. Furchgott summed up the case’s outcome by saying, “essentially, the ruling said people could record copyrighted material for personal, noncommercial use.” First of all, “noncommercial use” makes it sound like as long as you are not selling what you copy from the CD, you can do whatever you want with it. Which would include sharing it online using p2p clients. This obviously is not the case, but it does sound like that would follow. In any case, Furchgott then makes an astute point; one that I completely agree with and believe is the strongest point against the nature of these laws: “Suppose you have a vinyl record and you want to hear it on your iPod. Does the recording have to come from your own album, or can you download a copy? […] After all, you have paid for the right to hear the song; does it matter where your specific copy comes from?” In this situation, if you download the song, the means by which you acquire the song is illegal. But you have already paid for the same exact song. Why does it matter how you acquire it if you have bought it? This moves the issue of legality solely to the means by which it was acquired, with no attention being made to whether or not it was purchased. This seems absurd. Why should it be legal to find and utilize the equipment to record a digital version from your own copy of the vinyl but illegal for you to simply download the same album that has already been digitalized? Either way, you have done the same two things: (1) you have bought the album, and (2) you have it digitally. Why should it matter how you manage to get the digital version, if you have already bought it? I argue that it doesn’t and that it shouldn’t.
You can imagine a similar dilemma with a collectible. Lets say I buy a limited edition collectible version of an album. I want to keep it sealed in the plastic since collectibles are always worth more if kept in mint condition. So I have legitimately bought this album. But how can I get the songs if I don’t open it? Why should it be illegal to download this album since I already bought it? Again, this goes back to the method of how it is acquired, it has nothing to do with theft, which is what this issue is supposed to be all about. If I were to ask: what is the main issue with online piracy? Presumably the answer would be something along the lines of: obtaining some digital media without paying for it. Essentially, online piracy equals online theft. But if I have bought the album, and I am legally allowed to copy it for personal use, how can I be stealing it by downloading it? Stealing implies I have not bought it, but I have bought it. This is a fundamental problem with the current definition of online piracy.
I will now show that the RIAA’s involvement in this issue is at times illegal, in some cases unethical, and is absolutely ineffective; therefore establishing that a new method of dealing with online piracy is needed. Before addressing the unlawful/unethical aspects, let us simply look at the common methods the RIAA use. According to Times Staff Writer Jay Cridlin, on March 19th 2007, the letters they send out to the accused music thieves threaten a lawsuit fining them at the cost of $750 per song. To avoid this, they are asked to settle for a sum of reportedly around $4,000. Their tactics have been regarded by critics as nothing but bullying. As Corynne McSherry, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation said, “That’s exactly the intent of it: 'Pay early, pay quickly and make this campaign easy for us, rather than fighting back.”
So where does all this money the RIAA is getting go? To the artists or record labels of the “stolen” songs? No. It goes into the RIAA’s funds for more downloader hunting. Since all the money accumulated by the RIAA goes right back into the RIAA’s pocket to enable them to hunt for more illegal downloaders, the only purpose this could be seeking to achieve is deterrence. If the goal were to give the money back to the deserving artists or record companies that are losing out from online piracy, the money the RIAA acquires should go back to them. But because it doesn’t, the RIAA’s goal must not be designed to reimburse those who are suffering from illegal music downloads, namely the artists and record companies. Therefore the RIAA’s actions serve merely as a deterrent against others downloading music illegally. As I will show later on, this deterrence is not working either, and thus, the efforts of the RIAA are a complete failure.
Now lets move on to address some ways the RIAA has acted unlawfully and unethically. Simon Hayes of The Australian, on November 7th 2006 said “Music and software industry lobby groups have been accused of touting ''absurd'' piracy figures in an effort to get tougher copyright laws and more police resources to enforce them.” On July 5th 2007, TECHWEB stated that the target of a music file-sharing lawsuit was fighting back, claiming that the investigation tactics used were illegal. “Court documents claim that the plaintiffs in the original lawsuit ‘agreed between themselves and understood that unlicensed and unlawful investigations would take place in order to provide evidence for this lawsuit, as well as thousands of others as part of a mass litigation campaign. On information and belief, the private investigations company hired by plaintiffs engaged in one or more overt acts of unlawful private investigation. Such actions constitute civil conspiracy under Texas common law.” Chris Ayres of The London Times, wrote on October 5th of 2007 about a specific lawsuit case dealing with illegally downloading music. He states, “A single mother from Minnesota was last night fined $222,000 - about five times her annual salary -for swapping music on the internet…The verdict means that Jammie Thomas, a 30-year-old Native American, will be ordered to pay $9,250 for each of the 24 songs…that she shared illegally. The fine will almost certainly go uncollected and is expected to drive Ms. Thomas, who has two children, into bankruptcy.” Ok, illegally downloading music is bad. Fine, but how can one justify putting this woman and her two children into bankruptcy as a result of it? What kind of life are these two young children going to have as a result of this? You may think this is an Appeal to Pity but in order for me to be committing such a fallacy, my argument must be founded solely on the appeal to your pity for the woman, and specifically, her two children. But I do not believe I am doing so. My argument lies in the fact that it is unjustifiable to cast a woman into bankruptcy for something as trivial as sharing music online. The impact it has on her and her children acts only to show the ridiculousness of what results from the current online piracy laws.
I will now show that the efforts of the RIAA have not even served as a deterrent for online music downloading and therefore certainly have not been effective in stopping it altogether. David George-Cosh, of The Globe and Mail in Canada reported on July 31st 2007 that the “fourth annual Digital Music Survey, which polled 1,700 people in the U.K., suggests that illegal music is more popular than ever before, with 43 per cent of respondents claiming that they are illegally downloading tracks, up from 36 per cent last year and from 40 per cent in 2005. This year, only 33 per cent said the risk of being prosecuted was enough of a deterrent to stop them from downloading unauthorized tracks, compared with 42 per cent in 2006. The findings also show that 18 per cent - nearly one in five respondents - said they planned on downloading more illegal music, up from 8 per cent in 2006.” Even the RIAA has admitted their efforts are not working. Chris Ayres of The Australian, said on October 5th 2007, “According to the RIAA, the number of households that have downloaded music with file-sharing software has risen from 6.9 million in April 2003 to 7.8 million in March [of 2007]…Fred von Lohmann, a lawyer who specializes in intellectual property at civil liberties group the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says ‘the RIAA’s legal campaign is having little effect.’”
On July 28th 2007, Fred Reed of The Washington Times compared the music industry’s campaign against illegal downloading to the war on drugs, calling it “a permanent and unwinnable struggle.” He then says, “The war isn’t working. It isn’t working partly because it is so very easy to download or copy digital material. And it isn’t working partly because the public doesn’t care. During Prohibition, illegal drinking was common and accepted, except by law enforcement. Today, countless respectable people smoke marijuana, and only cops care. And no one cares about music downloads except the RIAA. It is very nearly impossible to enforce a law without the support of the population.” He then asks, “thirty years from now will the RIAA still be suing people right and left in a desperate attempt to stop the unstoppable? It is probably not a good thing to have laws that are both unenforceable and widely ignored. The alternative is to come up with a way of managing copyright and royalties that recognizes reality.”
This is similar to what Barrie McKenna of The Globe and Mail in Canada said on August 28th 2007: “For years, the recording industry focused almost exclusively on trying to stamp out piracy by suppressing demand through lawsuits…The industry’s dilemma might be a lot more manageable today if it hadn’t been so late to embrace digital music as the innovation that it is, rather than a threat to be thwarted at every turn.”
I have now shown how the current laws dealing with downloading music are flawed in that they deal more with the method of acquiring music rather than the theft of music. I have also shown that the efforts put forth by the RIAA are not only at times illegal and unethical, but they just simply are not solving the problem. We need a new system; one that provides us with a new way of understanding and defining this issue that is a better and more accurate account of what we really mean by saying “online piracy” along with new laws to abide by this new definition.
My plan consists of redefining the term piracy so that it applies only to what we actually mean when we use the term as well as developing a new system for the digital media world to replace the RIAA. At the very least, I propose new laws to change the definition of piracy to read that downloading or copying (provided it is for personal use only) music, or any other kind of digital media, is to be considered “piracy” only if such media has not already been purchased by the downloader. The ultimate however, would be to legalize file sharing all together (as I will address below).
As for alternatives to the RIAA, more organizations like Creative Commons (a non-profit organization working to expand the range of digital media that is available for others to legally build upon and to share with other) need to be implemented and more organizations compelled to work with such companies in order to increase the legality of file sharing. Obviously legalizing file sharing all together will eliminate the unwinnable war the RIAA has tried to fight. This would also do away with a need for such an organization as the RIAA altogether. However the question remains, how will the artists get their compensation? Well, first of all, as I addressed above, their not getting it now since none of the proceeds the RIAA gets goes back to the artists, labels, or record companies. But besides that, as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (the leading civil liberties group defending people’s rights in dealing with digital materials) has suggested, if we legalize file sharing, we could compensate the artists, labels, and record companies by implementing a surplus in internet service provider fees. Indeed, forcing these solutions is not only the best solution against such an unwinnable/unstoppable war, it is the only solution, unless we want to keep things the way they are.
The agent for implementing these changes will be the World Trade Organization. Funding will be minimal since the changes only involve creating new laws to replace the old ones defining Internet piracy and/or determining the legality of downloading altogether. These plans will clearly fix the problems since they all deal with definitional problems. The laws currently result in inconsistencies with what we mean when we correlate the term “stealing” with the word “piracy.” Therefore, changing the laws as I have described will result in the disappearance of such inconsistencies; problem solved. Also, if file sharing were to be legalized completely, then the problems being raised as a result of the RIAA would also disappear because such an organization would no longer be needed. Also, if the Internet service provider fees were increased to account for the compensation of the artists being “harmed” from downloaded music, this would dismiss the issue that the artists are loosing money from the legalization of downloading. Again, problem solved.
Even if only the new laws defining piracy are implemented, this will still result in advantages. By changing the way we define piracy as I have stated above, we can focus on what we are really concerned with when it comes to internet piracy: theft. Right now, the focus is simply: anything you download is illegal. Under my plan, downloading when you have already bought the content will not be illegal. This will allow the officials to focus on those who are truly stealing what they download. If we legalize file sharing all together, we obviously have much more freedom when it comes to what we have legal access to on the Internet. My plan also accommodates for compensating those who are losing money as a result of the way things are now. All in all, this plan fixes the problem the whole “file sharing is illegal” debacle at the root of its true causes.
My response to Affirmative Opening
From Alex Gromak
The issue of online piracy, specifically illegally downloading music, is a topic that has been given a lot of attention in the past decade (Note, I will be focusing on the issue of downloading music, although this can be extended to all forms of digital media). Most of this discussion has been one side arguing that downloading music is not illegal, while the opposing side argues that it is. In actuality, downloading music online, commonly through p2p clients, is illegal. The question is: should it be? In this essay, I will show why the current laws that make downloading music illegal are flawed, and how the efforts to eliminate this issue are not effective. In doing so I will argue that we need a new, more accurate definition of Internet piracy and that the laws must be changed to better suit the issue at hand. Finally, I will demonstrate why organizations like the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), who hunt down and prosecute illegal music downloaders, are not working, in any sense, to solve this problem; not to mention the possibility that their own efforts to find illegal downloaders may be illegal, and their results unethical.
To begin, let’s look at some ways in which the current laws that deem music downloading to be illegal are flawed. Roy Furchgott, in The International Herald Tribune, on September 4th of 2008 explains that in the United States, a case pitting Sony Corporation of America against Universal City Studios, known as “The Betamax case” allows people to record CDs to their iPods. Furchgott summed up the case’s outcome by saying, “essentially, the ruling said people could record copyrighted material for personal, noncommercial use.” First of all, “noncommercial use” makes it sound like as long as you are not selling what you copy from the CD, you can do whatever you want with it. Which would include sharing it online using p2p clients. This obviously is not the case, but it does sound like that would follow. In any case, Furchgott then makes an astute point; one that I completely agree with and believe is the strongest point against the nature of these laws: “Suppose you have a vinyl record and you want to hear it on your iPod. Does the recording have to come from your own album, or can you download a copy? […] After all, you have paid for the right to hear the song; does it matter where your specific copy comes from?” In this situation, if you download the song, the means by which you acquire the song is illegal. But you have already paid for the same exact song. Why does it matter how you acquire it if you have bought it? This moves the issue of legality solely to the means by which it was acquired, with no attention being made to whether or not it was purchased. This seems absurd. Why should it be legal to find and utilize the equipment to record a digital version from your own copy of the vinyl but illegal for you to simply download the same album that has already been digitalized? Either way, you have done the same two things: (1) you have bought the album, and (2) you have it digitally. Why should it matter how you manage to get the digital version, if you have already bought it? I argue that it doesn’t and that it shouldn’t.
You can imagine a similar dilemma with a collectible. Lets say I buy a limited edition collectible version of an album. I want to keep it sealed in the plastic since collectibles are always worth more if kept in mint condition. So I have legitimately bought this album. But how can I get the songs if I don’t open it? Why should it be illegal to download this album since I already bought it? Again, this goes back to the method of how it is acquired, it has nothing to do with theft, which is what this issue is supposed to be all about. If I were to ask: what is the main issue with online piracy? Presumably the answer would be something along the lines of: obtaining some digital media without paying for it. Essentially, online piracy equals online theft. But if I have bought the album, and I am legally allowed to copy it for personal use, how can I be stealing it by downloading it? Stealing implies I have not bought it, but I have bought it. This is a fundamental problem with the current definition of online piracy.
I will now show that the RIAA’s involvement in this issue is at times illegal, in some cases unethical, and is absolutely ineffective; therefore establishing that a new method of dealing with online piracy is needed. Before addressing the unlawful/unethical aspects, let us simply look at the common methods the RIAA use. According to Times Staff Writer Jay Cridlin, on March 19th 2007, the letters they send out to the accused music thieves threaten a lawsuit fining them at the cost of $750 per song. To avoid this, they are asked to settle for a sum of reportedly around $4,000. Their tactics have been regarded by critics as nothing but bullying. As Corynne McSherry, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation said, “That’s exactly the intent of it: 'Pay early, pay quickly and make this campaign easy for us, rather than fighting back.”
So where does all this money the RIAA is getting go? To the artists or record labels of the “stolen” songs? No. It goes into the RIAA’s funds for more downloader hunting. Since all the money accumulated by the RIAA goes right back into the RIAA’s pocket to enable them to hunt for more illegal downloaders, the only purpose this could be seeking to achieve is deterrence. If the goal were to give the money back to the deserving artists or record companies that are losing out from online piracy, the money the RIAA acquires should go back to them. But because it doesn’t, the RIAA’s goal must not be designed to reimburse those who are suffering from illegal music downloads, namely the artists and record companies. Therefore the RIAA’s actions serve merely as a deterrent against others downloading music illegally. As I will show later on, this deterrence is not working either, and thus, the efforts of the RIAA are a complete failure.
Now lets move on to address some ways the RIAA has acted unlawfully and unethically. Simon Hayes of The Australian, on November 7th 2006 said “Music and software industry lobby groups have been accused of touting ''absurd'' piracy figures in an effort to get tougher copyright laws and more police resources to enforce them.” On July 5th 2007, TECHWEB stated that the target of a music file-sharing lawsuit was fighting back, claiming that the investigation tactics used were illegal. “Court documents claim that the plaintiffs in the original lawsuit ‘agreed between themselves and understood that unlicensed and unlawful investigations would take place in order to provide evidence for this lawsuit, as well as thousands of others as part of a mass litigation campaign. On information and belief, the private investigations company hired by plaintiffs engaged in one or more overt acts of unlawful private investigation. Such actions constitute civil conspiracy under Texas common law.” Chris Ayres of The London Times, wrote on October 5th of 2007 about a specific lawsuit case dealing with illegally downloading music. He states, “A single mother from Minnesota was last night fined $222,000 - about five times her annual salary -for swapping music on the internet…The verdict means that Jammie Thomas, a 30-year-old Native American, will be ordered to pay $9,250 for each of the 24 songs…that she shared illegally. The fine will almost certainly go uncollected and is expected to drive Ms. Thomas, who has two children, into bankruptcy.” Ok, illegally downloading music is bad. Fine, but how can one justify putting this woman and her two children into bankruptcy as a result of it? What kind of life are these two young children going to have as a result of this? You may think this is an Appeal to Pity but in order for me to be committing such a fallacy, my argument must be founded solely on the appeal to your pity for the woman, and specifically, her two children. But I do not believe I am doing so. My argument lies in the fact that it is unjustifiable to cast a woman into bankruptcy for something as trivial as sharing music online. The impact it has on her and her children acts only to show the ridiculousness of what results from the current online piracy laws.
I will now show that the efforts of the RIAA have not even served as a deterrent for online music downloading and therefore certainly have not been effective in stopping it altogether. David George-Cosh, of The Globe and Mail in Canada reported on July 31st 2007 that the “fourth annual Digital Music Survey, which polled 1,700 people in the U.K., suggests that illegal music is more popular than ever before, with 43 per cent of respondents claiming that they are illegally downloading tracks, up from 36 per cent last year and from 40 per cent in 2005. This year, only 33 per cent said the risk of being prosecuted was enough of a deterrent to stop them from downloading unauthorized tracks, compared with 42 per cent in 2006. The findings also show that 18 per cent - nearly one in five respondents - said they planned on downloading more illegal music, up from 8 per cent in 2006.” Even the RIAA has admitted their efforts are not working. Chris Ayres of The Australian, said on October 5th 2007, “According to the RIAA, the number of households that have downloaded music with file-sharing software has risen from 6.9 million in April 2003 to 7.8 million in March [of 2007]…Fred von Lohmann, a lawyer who specializes in intellectual property at civil liberties group the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says ‘the RIAA’s legal campaign is having little effect.’”
On July 28th 2007, Fred Reed of The Washington Times compared the music industry’s campaign against illegal downloading to the war on drugs, calling it “a permanent and unwinnable struggle.” He then says, “The war isn’t working. It isn’t working partly because it is so very easy to download or copy digital material. And it isn’t working partly because the public doesn’t care. During Prohibition, illegal drinking was common and accepted, except by law enforcement. Today, countless respectable people smoke marijuana, and only cops care. And no one cares about music downloads except the RIAA. It is very nearly impossible to enforce a law without the support of the population.” He then asks, “thirty years from now will the RIAA still be suing people right and left in a desperate attempt to stop the unstoppable? It is probably not a good thing to have laws that are both unenforceable and widely ignored. The alternative is to come up with a way of managing copyright and royalties that recognizes reality.”
This is similar to what Barrie McKenna of The Globe and Mail in Canada said on August 28th 2007: “For years, the recording industry focused almost exclusively on trying to stamp out piracy by suppressing demand through lawsuits…The industry’s dilemma might be a lot more manageable today if it hadn’t been so late to embrace digital music as the innovation that it is, rather than a threat to be thwarted at every turn.”
I have now shown how the current laws dealing with downloading music are flawed in that they deal more with the method of acquiring music rather than the theft of music. I have also shown that the efforts put forth by the RIAA are not only at times illegal and unethical, but they just simply are not solving the problem. We need a new system; one that provides us with a new way of understanding and defining this issue that is a better and more accurate account of what we really mean by saying “online piracy” along with new laws to abide by this new definition.
My plan consists of redefining the term piracy so that it applies only to what we actually mean when we use the term as well as developing a new system for the digital media world to replace the RIAA. At the very least, I propose new laws to change the definition of piracy to read that downloading or copying (provided it is for personal use only) music, or any other kind of digital media, is to be considered “piracy” only if such media has not already been purchased by the downloader. The ultimate however, would be to legalize file sharing all together (as I will address below).
As for alternatives to the RIAA, more organizations like Creative Commons (a non-profit organization working to expand the range of digital media that is available for others to legally build upon and to share with other) need to be implemented and more organizations compelled to work with such companies in order to increase the legality of file sharing. Obviously legalizing file sharing all together will eliminate the unwinnable war the RIAA has tried to fight. This would also do away with a need for such an organization as the RIAA altogether. However the question remains, how will the artists get their compensation? Well, first of all, as I addressed above, their not getting it now since none of the proceeds the RIAA gets goes back to the artists, labels, or record companies. But besides that, as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (the leading civil liberties group defending people’s rights in dealing with digital materials) has suggested, if we legalize file sharing, we could compensate the artists, labels, and record companies by implementing a surplus in internet service provider fees. Indeed, forcing these solutions is not only the best solution against such an unwinnable/unstoppable war, it is the only solution, unless we want to keep things the way they are.
The agent for implementing these changes will be the World Trade Organization. Funding will be minimal since the changes only involve creating new laws to replace the old ones defining Internet piracy and/or determining the legality of downloading altogether. These plans will clearly fix the problems since they all deal with definitional problems. The laws currently result in inconsistencies with what we mean when we correlate the term “stealing” with the word “piracy.” Therefore, changing the laws as I have described will result in the disappearance of such inconsistencies; problem solved. Also, if file sharing were to be legalized completely, then the problems being raised as a result of the RIAA would also disappear because such an organization would no longer be needed. Also, if the Internet service provider fees were increased to account for the compensation of the artists being “harmed” from downloaded music, this would dismiss the issue that the artists are loosing money from the legalization of downloading. Again, problem solved.
Even if only the new laws defining piracy are implemented, this will still result in advantages. By changing the way we define piracy as I have stated above, we can focus on what we are really concerned with when it comes to internet piracy: theft. Right now, the focus is simply: anything you download is illegal. Under my plan, downloading when you have already bought the content will not be illegal. This will allow the officials to focus on those who are truly stealing what they download. If we legalize file sharing all together, we obviously have much more freedom when it comes to what we have legal access to on the Internet. My plan also accommodates for compensating those who are losing money as a result of the way things are now. All in all, this plan fixes the problem the whole “file sharing is illegal” debacle at the root of its true causes.
My response to Affirmative Opening
The Debate: Part 2 - Negation Opening
My response.
It's easy to imagine that the methods of dealing with Internet piracy should come down to villains and heroes, evil umbrella corporations and those that fight them. But it doesn't work out so simply; it's easy to call the RIAA an evil company, failing and backwards in both their methods and operational philosophy. To simply say that the RIAA should be bypassed as a way of dealing with music piracy isn't going to be effective; although their process of hunting down and prosecuting individual downloaders is clearly not working, the RIAA must have a direct hand in any new methods implementing – the record producers trust them and, according to their website, www.riaa.com, 90% of all recorded American music is done through them. What must be done, instead, is a complete reworking of the functionality that the RIAA themselves have. As they represent the almost the entirety of the music industry legally, they simply can't be left out of any equation.
Instead of changing the terminology of laws – which is a dangerous idea that I will return to shortly – it would be better to provide incentive for consumers to not break laws. It's easy to say that because a law is difficult to enforce or police that it should be changed or renamed. However, the music industry – and the producers of IP, or intellectual property, the legal terminology for such things – deserves to have the integrity of their work preserved, just like a bread baker in a city.
Changing the laws so that they merely re-brand illegal downloading of music to something different is a poor idea. This is for two reasons;
1.The name that something or some person has, especially when it's a title, can have a powerful impact on a person. Take in example the words “freedom fighter” and “terrorist”. Although they technically mean the same thing, people will react dramatically differently to them when they encounter them – if a local citizen perceives a gun-toting young man as a freedom fighter, they are dramatically more likely to help them, as they have real gains to be made should the young man be successful. But what if they recognize them as a “terrorist”? This becomes much more gray, as the word “terrorist” implies the destruction of public, non-governmental structures and acts of violence, and most citizens would be far less likely to aid them. Unless, of course, they were scared for their lives, but we're speaking on motivations to make decisions freely.
2.It won't necessarily change anything. Changing the title of an action to disguise its criminality isn't going to make it have less of an impact on the music industry, or other individuals – like the artists themselves – that music theft can have. What will happen is that it will encourage more people to download illegally because, well, it doesn't sound like it's so bad – it's not piracy, after all. Currently, one of the focuses in the war on drugs is to create awareness among people that drugs are incredibly dangerous to take. So too with the anti-piracy campaign – it's trying to be demonstrated to the public that piracy does real damage and has real consequences. Rebranding piracy to something that makes it easier to handle on one's conscience is only going to make things worse.
I suggest instead that the shift on anti-piracy comes not from the consumers or the law, but instead from the producers of IP themselves. In order for the populace to stop downloading freely – which is something incredibly difficult to both track and police – they must be provided with not merely alternate, legal choices, but better alternate choices.
The example given of downloading a CD of an enclosed vinyl album after purchasing it is an interesting one, because this is exactly where the music industry should come in. The following is a series of proposals that, were they followed, would not only decrease piracy, but greatly increase profits.
1.Record companies ought to (and most of them do – services like iTunes demonstrate this) have the entirety of their music collection online and available, and given certain parameters, consumers should have free access to it.
2.When a customer purchases a CD or song, whether online or off, they should do so with a registration key of some sort – whether a username, unique ID or email address – and they should then be able to use this access to freely download another copy of the same song at any time, so long as the record company remains in business.
3.Record companies must work actively to develop products that are simply better than those that are pirated; Disney co-chair Anne Sweeney recently admitted to the website www.paidcontent.org that “piracy is a business model” and that “it exists to serve a need in the market”. This is the exact sort of acknowledgment needed by the IP industry as a whole, as it allows for solutions such as 3. to function. In providing lifetime downloading access to previously paid-for tracks, (something iTunes does currently) providing higher quality audio than those found on pirated sites (325kbps vs 128kbps – a dramatic difference in quality), offering full, digital sleeve notes, interviews with the bands, etc for the same price – then they will have a product that is categorically better than that of the pirated version.
Will consumers spend more money for a better product? Twentieth Century Fox thinks so; in China, DVD piracy is a rampant issue, and although most companies have been attempting to force the law to do their bidding, Fox had a better idea; produce a series of high-quality official DVDs, and sell them for about 2$. They aren't making nearly as much money as they would be if those people were buying the 10-15$ DVDs, but they're still turning a profit from it. Even though the discs are double the street value of the pirated version, they're still being purchased by the consumer – as reported by the Wall Street Journal.
The primary difficulty with the suggestion that downloading copies of the same music after you've already purchased it should be legal – or rebranded alternatively – is that you're not downloading the same copy. If we're talking about analogue vinyl's, then, according to hydrogenaudio.org on July 15 2005, the bitrate – or audio quality – on a vinyl is around 650kbps, and that of a CD is 1378 kbps. Double the quality – how, if two things are exactly the same, can one of them be twice the quality of another?
You bought the vinyl, and the rights to that – you did not buy the 1378 kbps quality version that you got from the website, you did not purchase the rights to the CD cover art (which often accompany pirated music), and you did not purchase the rights to distribute it – which is probably what you're doing if you let your p2p client remain at default settings. When you purchased the vinyl, you had every right to use it for noncommercial use – but you didn't purchase the rights to every version of it every recorded. Although it's something of a slippery slope, I feel it should be considered: if you bought the rights to, say, Radiohead's “The Bends” (the single), should you receive rights to versions of it played live, old versions that didn't make the actual album? No, most people would correctly argue – and it's the same for what are perceived duplicates of the media on the internet.
The other massive difficulty with illegally downloading files that you may have already purchased is the method by which you're getting them – and yes, it does matter. Just because it was that drug dealer down the street that stole the television and sold it to you doesn't mean that you're not directly involved with the theft, and it's similar with music piracy. We'll even assume that you're not using a torrent site which are currently the fastest and most effective way to pirate music – but we won't assume this because they force the user to also upload their files (illegally). So we'll use the example of a standard p2p client, like Kazaa or Limewire, to preserve the relative legality of what we're doing. The trouble is .. if you load up any of these services, or go to their websites, then you're providing hits on their advertisements. Although you're not directly handing the pirates money, you're indirectly providing it for them – and by using their service, you're also endorsing their actions and those of everyone else using the service illegally, and are therefore becoming a part of it yourself.
How you get your music does matter, although it's a given that the methods by which you procure it should change. Again, if the record industries, instead of legal entities, presided over these events with profitability in mind and not the destruction of individuals, then this would not be nearly the problem that it is today. Providing money to a drug dealer for stolen goods, whether they are illegal or not, is still aiding and abetting theft – just like downloading a file that you might legally already own that was illegally produced is still, and should be still, considered illegal.
The Washington Times article cited suggests and directly states that, “...no one cares about music downloads except the RIAA” simply is not true. Although the band Metallica were perhaps overzealous in their charges and rabid in the pursuit of .. justice, they nonetheless publicly spoke out against Napster, an early p2p file-sharing application, at the 1997 MTV Music Video Awards, arguing that they were directly losing money because of the theft of their music online – demonstrating that, regardless of the actual impact that the downloading was having financially on them, they were still upset. Most people would argue that Metallica isn't exactly a “no one” in the music industry.
Although putting an additional service access fee onto the ever-rising cost of high-speed internet is an interesting solution, it isn't a fair one, although it's exactly what Jim Griffin and Warner Music are going to attempt to do (as pulled from www.portfolio.com). Why isn't it fair? Because not everyone will be using the service, or will want to have digital access to music. It also doesn't guarantee that the actual artists will receive the money any more than current contracts allow for. If this were an opt-in sort of tax that allowed you unlimited access to whatever music you wanted (provided your label had it online and the music you wanted was available and not something archaic and weird), then many people would simply choose to not opt-in and would continue pirating; why pay for a service that offers not only nothing better than the illegal market, but offers even less?
Again, the solution must come from the record companies themselves. Similar to how the only way to win the drug war is to convince people to not use narcotics of their own free will – instead of pouring billions of wasted dollars into South-American countries fruitlessly – the only way to win the war against piracy will be to convince consumers that it is in their best interest to actually pay for things. This means things like unlimited access to things you've already purchased, free updates and support for software, and extra features not available to pirated versions. Valve, the company behind the tremendously popular Half-Life series, already does this with games through a service called Steam. Steam is entirely free to download and use, and provides social networking and matchmaking for games. It also has the widest selection of digital games on the internet – and it sells a lot of them. If you ever move, or get a new computer, or have any number of things happen to your copy of a downloaded game, you can always simply re-download it. Irritating? Maybe. But not as much as having to either go to the store or deal with pirate sites to get a new copy if you don't want to pay for it again. They also offer patches, support, free multiplayer – and they're making money with it.
One of the other things that Valve does is force all of their games to communicate with the “home server” in order to be played – if you want to play the single-player version of Half-Life 2, you still must have an internet connection. Although frustrating on occasion, the otherwise convenience of the service more than makes up for it. This can happen with music and movies, too – with the ubiquity of wifi access, it will be a short few years before every music-capable device can access the internet at any time. Using services like these – called DRM, or Digital Rights Management – allows companies to track and secure their product at any given time.
Through a combination of non-intrusive DRM and high consumer viability, the IP industry can combat piracy by outright winning the war; because it's just so easy to download IP and so difficult to stop, alternate methods must be decided upon. Should they be new laws? Probably not – this is a problem that the free market is designed to handle, and it should be left in it's hands. Forcing it into the government – even if its a world-organization like the WTO – will simply slow things down and nobody will be happy. The laws won't be able to significantly change anything, people won't stop downloading things, and the record companies will continue to hemorrhage money because they spent money lobbying instead of focusing on upgrading their infrastructure – which is exactly how they've spent the last two decades, although the lobbying money has also been tied up with the RIAA.
The WTO is also a somewhat poor choice to implement changes like additional ISP charges; seeing as how these are currently handled on a national, regional-level, an international body of commerce isn't going to be able to affect much change on them – but the ISPs and record companies are specifically engineered to change and to adapt quickly.
Granted, increasing the use of Creative Commons licensing will go a good ways, and will help some people tremendously; since early 2008, www.boingboing.net has been hosting the serialized version of Joe Jutsko's The Deal under CC licensing. Although he has probably made more money as a result of this than he would have had he forced everyone to buy it, this isn't for everyone – some people, particularly those that have already served their time and spent decades developing their craft – already have a name out there, and just want to get paid. CC licensing is great for people that just want to develop a name for themselves, or believe in the cause that IP should be public – but there are those that just want to make money, and why shouldn't they? Forcing CC on them will greatly limit their potential income.
A final point of clarity: anything you download currently is not illegal. I can connect my iTunes PC music player to their store, and peruse millions of songs that are perfectly legal to download (provided I pay for them). They're very high quality, come with full record art, and the price is reasonable – and Apple and their iPods have sold tremendously well directly as a result for being so far ahead of the curve. Or I could go to the Zune Marketplace, where I can pay $14.99 for unlimited monthly downloads – although you lose access to the music if you stop paying, it's still a pretty damn good price for unlimited and legal music. This argument isn't so much one about getting fair access to things that have already been paid for, it's about justifying the illegality of something, morally and ethically – to ones self.
While legalizing file sharing entirely would provide for an interesting framework of new media developments, I'm not sure that this is at all an optimal idea – would companies like Microsoft really keep producing and updating Windows if nobody was paying for it? Would we have access to wonderful, modern pop music if there weren't billions of dollars to be made from it? I doubt it – consumers vote with their money, and allowing everything to essentially become free instead of addressing the issues would probably just make everything worse.
Carolyn's Response - Affirmative 2
It's easy to imagine that the methods of dealing with Internet piracy should come down to villains and heroes, evil umbrella corporations and those that fight them. But it doesn't work out so simply; it's easy to call the RIAA an evil company, failing and backwards in both their methods and operational philosophy. To simply say that the RIAA should be bypassed as a way of dealing with music piracy isn't going to be effective; although their process of hunting down and prosecuting individual downloaders is clearly not working, the RIAA must have a direct hand in any new methods implementing – the record producers trust them and, according to their website, www.riaa.com, 90% of all recorded American music is done through them. What must be done, instead, is a complete reworking of the functionality that the RIAA themselves have. As they represent the almost the entirety of the music industry legally, they simply can't be left out of any equation.
Instead of changing the terminology of laws – which is a dangerous idea that I will return to shortly – it would be better to provide incentive for consumers to not break laws. It's easy to say that because a law is difficult to enforce or police that it should be changed or renamed. However, the music industry – and the producers of IP, or intellectual property, the legal terminology for such things – deserves to have the integrity of their work preserved, just like a bread baker in a city.
Changing the laws so that they merely re-brand illegal downloading of music to something different is a poor idea. This is for two reasons;
1.The name that something or some person has, especially when it's a title, can have a powerful impact on a person. Take in example the words “freedom fighter” and “terrorist”. Although they technically mean the same thing, people will react dramatically differently to them when they encounter them – if a local citizen perceives a gun-toting young man as a freedom fighter, they are dramatically more likely to help them, as they have real gains to be made should the young man be successful. But what if they recognize them as a “terrorist”? This becomes much more gray, as the word “terrorist” implies the destruction of public, non-governmental structures and acts of violence, and most citizens would be far less likely to aid them. Unless, of course, they were scared for their lives, but we're speaking on motivations to make decisions freely.
2.It won't necessarily change anything. Changing the title of an action to disguise its criminality isn't going to make it have less of an impact on the music industry, or other individuals – like the artists themselves – that music theft can have. What will happen is that it will encourage more people to download illegally because, well, it doesn't sound like it's so bad – it's not piracy, after all. Currently, one of the focuses in the war on drugs is to create awareness among people that drugs are incredibly dangerous to take. So too with the anti-piracy campaign – it's trying to be demonstrated to the public that piracy does real damage and has real consequences. Rebranding piracy to something that makes it easier to handle on one's conscience is only going to make things worse.
I suggest instead that the shift on anti-piracy comes not from the consumers or the law, but instead from the producers of IP themselves. In order for the populace to stop downloading freely – which is something incredibly difficult to both track and police – they must be provided with not merely alternate, legal choices, but better alternate choices.
The example given of downloading a CD of an enclosed vinyl album after purchasing it is an interesting one, because this is exactly where the music industry should come in. The following is a series of proposals that, were they followed, would not only decrease piracy, but greatly increase profits.
1.Record companies ought to (and most of them do – services like iTunes demonstrate this) have the entirety of their music collection online and available, and given certain parameters, consumers should have free access to it.
2.When a customer purchases a CD or song, whether online or off, they should do so with a registration key of some sort – whether a username, unique ID or email address – and they should then be able to use this access to freely download another copy of the same song at any time, so long as the record company remains in business.
3.Record companies must work actively to develop products that are simply better than those that are pirated; Disney co-chair Anne Sweeney recently admitted to the website www.paidcontent.org that “piracy is a business model” and that “it exists to serve a need in the market”. This is the exact sort of acknowledgment needed by the IP industry as a whole, as it allows for solutions such as 3. to function. In providing lifetime downloading access to previously paid-for tracks, (something iTunes does currently) providing higher quality audio than those found on pirated sites (325kbps vs 128kbps – a dramatic difference in quality), offering full, digital sleeve notes, interviews with the bands, etc for the same price – then they will have a product that is categorically better than that of the pirated version.
Will consumers spend more money for a better product? Twentieth Century Fox thinks so; in China, DVD piracy is a rampant issue, and although most companies have been attempting to force the law to do their bidding, Fox had a better idea; produce a series of high-quality official DVDs, and sell them for about 2$. They aren't making nearly as much money as they would be if those people were buying the 10-15$ DVDs, but they're still turning a profit from it. Even though the discs are double the street value of the pirated version, they're still being purchased by the consumer – as reported by the Wall Street Journal.
The primary difficulty with the suggestion that downloading copies of the same music after you've already purchased it should be legal – or rebranded alternatively – is that you're not downloading the same copy. If we're talking about analogue vinyl's, then, according to hydrogenaudio.org on July 15 2005, the bitrate – or audio quality – on a vinyl is around 650kbps, and that of a CD is 1378 kbps. Double the quality – how, if two things are exactly the same, can one of them be twice the quality of another?
You bought the vinyl, and the rights to that – you did not buy the 1378 kbps quality version that you got from the website, you did not purchase the rights to the CD cover art (which often accompany pirated music), and you did not purchase the rights to distribute it – which is probably what you're doing if you let your p2p client remain at default settings. When you purchased the vinyl, you had every right to use it for noncommercial use – but you didn't purchase the rights to every version of it every recorded. Although it's something of a slippery slope, I feel it should be considered: if you bought the rights to, say, Radiohead's “The Bends” (the single), should you receive rights to versions of it played live, old versions that didn't make the actual album? No, most people would correctly argue – and it's the same for what are perceived duplicates of the media on the internet.
The other massive difficulty with illegally downloading files that you may have already purchased is the method by which you're getting them – and yes, it does matter. Just because it was that drug dealer down the street that stole the television and sold it to you doesn't mean that you're not directly involved with the theft, and it's similar with music piracy. We'll even assume that you're not using a torrent site which are currently the fastest and most effective way to pirate music – but we won't assume this because they force the user to also upload their files (illegally). So we'll use the example of a standard p2p client, like Kazaa or Limewire, to preserve the relative legality of what we're doing. The trouble is .. if you load up any of these services, or go to their websites, then you're providing hits on their advertisements. Although you're not directly handing the pirates money, you're indirectly providing it for them – and by using their service, you're also endorsing their actions and those of everyone else using the service illegally, and are therefore becoming a part of it yourself.
How you get your music does matter, although it's a given that the methods by which you procure it should change. Again, if the record industries, instead of legal entities, presided over these events with profitability in mind and not the destruction of individuals, then this would not be nearly the problem that it is today. Providing money to a drug dealer for stolen goods, whether they are illegal or not, is still aiding and abetting theft – just like downloading a file that you might legally already own that was illegally produced is still, and should be still, considered illegal.
The Washington Times article cited suggests and directly states that, “...no one cares about music downloads except the RIAA” simply is not true. Although the band Metallica were perhaps overzealous in their charges and rabid in the pursuit of .. justice, they nonetheless publicly spoke out against Napster, an early p2p file-sharing application, at the 1997 MTV Music Video Awards, arguing that they were directly losing money because of the theft of their music online – demonstrating that, regardless of the actual impact that the downloading was having financially on them, they were still upset. Most people would argue that Metallica isn't exactly a “no one” in the music industry.
Although putting an additional service access fee onto the ever-rising cost of high-speed internet is an interesting solution, it isn't a fair one, although it's exactly what Jim Griffin and Warner Music are going to attempt to do (as pulled from www.portfolio.com). Why isn't it fair? Because not everyone will be using the service, or will want to have digital access to music. It also doesn't guarantee that the actual artists will receive the money any more than current contracts allow for. If this were an opt-in sort of tax that allowed you unlimited access to whatever music you wanted (provided your label had it online and the music you wanted was available and not something archaic and weird), then many people would simply choose to not opt-in and would continue pirating; why pay for a service that offers not only nothing better than the illegal market, but offers even less?
Again, the solution must come from the record companies themselves. Similar to how the only way to win the drug war is to convince people to not use narcotics of their own free will – instead of pouring billions of wasted dollars into South-American countries fruitlessly – the only way to win the war against piracy will be to convince consumers that it is in their best interest to actually pay for things. This means things like unlimited access to things you've already purchased, free updates and support for software, and extra features not available to pirated versions. Valve, the company behind the tremendously popular Half-Life series, already does this with games through a service called Steam. Steam is entirely free to download and use, and provides social networking and matchmaking for games. It also has the widest selection of digital games on the internet – and it sells a lot of them. If you ever move, or get a new computer, or have any number of things happen to your copy of a downloaded game, you can always simply re-download it. Irritating? Maybe. But not as much as having to either go to the store or deal with pirate sites to get a new copy if you don't want to pay for it again. They also offer patches, support, free multiplayer – and they're making money with it.
One of the other things that Valve does is force all of their games to communicate with the “home server” in order to be played – if you want to play the single-player version of Half-Life 2, you still must have an internet connection. Although frustrating on occasion, the otherwise convenience of the service more than makes up for it. This can happen with music and movies, too – with the ubiquity of wifi access, it will be a short few years before every music-capable device can access the internet at any time. Using services like these – called DRM, or Digital Rights Management – allows companies to track and secure their product at any given time.
Through a combination of non-intrusive DRM and high consumer viability, the IP industry can combat piracy by outright winning the war; because it's just so easy to download IP and so difficult to stop, alternate methods must be decided upon. Should they be new laws? Probably not – this is a problem that the free market is designed to handle, and it should be left in it's hands. Forcing it into the government – even if its a world-organization like the WTO – will simply slow things down and nobody will be happy. The laws won't be able to significantly change anything, people won't stop downloading things, and the record companies will continue to hemorrhage money because they spent money lobbying instead of focusing on upgrading their infrastructure – which is exactly how they've spent the last two decades, although the lobbying money has also been tied up with the RIAA.
The WTO is also a somewhat poor choice to implement changes like additional ISP charges; seeing as how these are currently handled on a national, regional-level, an international body of commerce isn't going to be able to affect much change on them – but the ISPs and record companies are specifically engineered to change and to adapt quickly.
Granted, increasing the use of Creative Commons licensing will go a good ways, and will help some people tremendously; since early 2008, www.boingboing.net has been hosting the serialized version of Joe Jutsko's The Deal under CC licensing. Although he has probably made more money as a result of this than he would have had he forced everyone to buy it, this isn't for everyone – some people, particularly those that have already served their time and spent decades developing their craft – already have a name out there, and just want to get paid. CC licensing is great for people that just want to develop a name for themselves, or believe in the cause that IP should be public – but there are those that just want to make money, and why shouldn't they? Forcing CC on them will greatly limit their potential income.
A final point of clarity: anything you download currently is not illegal. I can connect my iTunes PC music player to their store, and peruse millions of songs that are perfectly legal to download (provided I pay for them). They're very high quality, come with full record art, and the price is reasonable – and Apple and their iPods have sold tremendously well directly as a result for being so far ahead of the curve. Or I could go to the Zune Marketplace, where I can pay $14.99 for unlimited monthly downloads – although you lose access to the music if you stop paying, it's still a pretty damn good price for unlimited and legal music. This argument isn't so much one about getting fair access to things that have already been paid for, it's about justifying the illegality of something, morally and ethically – to ones self.
While legalizing file sharing entirely would provide for an interesting framework of new media developments, I'm not sure that this is at all an optimal idea – would companies like Microsoft really keep producing and updating Windows if nobody was paying for it? Would we have access to wonderful, modern pop music if there weren't billions of dollars to be made from it? I doubt it – consumers vote with their money, and allowing everything to essentially become free instead of addressing the issues would probably just make everything worse.
Carolyn's Response - Affirmative 2
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)